Overview
- Hideo Kojima says he played Super Mario Bros. for a year in college and even skipped school to keep playing.
- He credits the game with his career choice, stating he probably would not be in the industry without it.
- The experience convinced him that video games could one day surpass movies despite the original’s minimal story.
- He now says he can’t really play the original, describing it as a simple side-scroller where timing, speed, and jump arcs carry the action.
- He cites Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and especially John Carpenter as key influences, and notes Metal Gear Solid 2 was intended as a reflection on life in the digital age rather than a story about AI.